From culturally competent education to water pipes, research is booming at FIU. Read here about some new funding for the College of Nursing and Health Sciences and the Robert Stempel School of Public Health.

FIU is making a new effort to build its own community of inventors. A revitalized Technology Management and Commercialization office is aiming to give guidance in technology transfer, financing and opportunities for inventors.

From Rachmaninov to rock ’n’ roll, listening to music while studying may help some children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). For some, music has similar positive effects to medication.

FIU will partner with North Carolina State University, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Virginia on a national nanotechnology research effort to create small, wearable, self-powered devices that will help people monitor their health.

As public universities across the nation grapple with another of several challenging budget years, new faculty orientation day 2012 at FIU was truly an affirming event. This year’s new additions help to advance the university’s strategic plan of building an outstanding faculty to teach its diverse and growing student body and to conduct world-class research.

Summer months brought a variety of interesting funding opportunities to FIU, from new grants to renewed funding for existing projects including the Center for Research on U.S. Latino HIV/AIDS and Drug Abuse (CRUSADA), Nuclear Research Interdisciplinary Program and STEM Transformation Institute.

You may have heard stories about emergency rescues of plants or animals from habitats facing imminent destruction. This is one of those stories, except that the scope of the rescue is unprecedented and the transplantation itself was—and continues to be—of great scientific significance.

Shekhar Bhansali’s life has taken him around the world. From his native India to Australia to Japan and finally the United States. Never one to follow the crowd, Bhansali instead chose a path that would test his ingenuity, show him new ways of approaching problems, and teach him lessons about working with people.

O. Dale Williams, who recently joined FIU as chair of the Department of Biostatistics and interim chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health in the Robert Stempel College of Public Health, grew up as a self-described “hillbilly” in the Ozark Mountains in Southwestern Missouri. He never envisioned himself heading up two academic departments at a major state university in Florida. But that’s exactly what happened.

On April 20, 1980, Fidel Castro proclaimed that any Cuban who wished to immigrate to the United States could leave. During the ensuing months, more than 125,000 Cubans fled from the port of Mariel. Among them several thousand self-identified homosexuals the communist nation deemed anti-revolutionary “undesirables.”

Cleaning up the nation’s hazardous nuclear energy sites is complex, technically challenging work that requires specialized skills. Yet leaders of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, which leads those efforts, are growing concerned: Some 80 percent of the employees with those skills will approach retirement in the next 10 years.

There may be no greater strain on a family than the death of a child. Yet hospitals, doctors, and nurses are often ill equipped to help surviving family – mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and grandparents – cope with the overwhelming emotions and stress.

These strange questions open a new book by FIU College of Law professor Elizabeth Price Foley. The Law of Life and Death, published by Harvard University Press, uses stories of real people to examine the laws that govern such complex, provocative issues as abortion, in-vitro fertilization, life support, cryogenics and physician-assisted suicide.

Public health experts have long known that black Americans infected with HIV die sooner on average than non-Hispanic white Americans. Many experts suspected this was because black HIV patients are more likely to be poor.

FIU biochemist Barry Rosen’s decades of research on how organisms handle arsenic at the molecular level is now pointing to strategies that may reduce the amount of arsenic that ends up in rice. His work also has implications for toxic waste cleanup and for optimizing drugs that use arsenic compounds to treat disease.

Two years ago, architecture professor Marilys Nepomechie and a group of FIU students conceived a home design perfect for South Florida – one that could get all its energy from the sun. This fall, they traveled to Washington, D.C., and built that house for a world-renowned competition: the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon.

After more than a century of developing, draining, and damming the Everglades, Floridians realized they not only were endangering the ecosystem’s unique plants and animals but also the water resources humans depend on. Now, after more than a decade of intense public, political, and scientific debate, Florida is attempting to reshape the ‘Glades once more, this time with the benevolent goal of “getting the water right.”

A species of palm, Orania zonae, was named for the Scott Zona, curator for the FIU Wertheim Conservatory and faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences. Zona was part of a research team that explored the Bird’s Head Peninsula of New Guinea and discovered 11 new species. They were described for the first time in: "A monograph of the genus Orania (Arecaceae: Oranieae)" earlier this year.

A team of researchers led by Florida International University researcher Kate Mansfield and Florida Atlantic University researcher Jeanette Wyneken have developed a safe and reliable method for tracking young sea turtles, to the oceans’ greatest mysteries. How did they do it? With hard work, a little ingenuity and a good manicurist.

When someone loses a limb to war, accident, or disease, she can get an artificial limb that restores some of her lost movement. But even the best prosthesis doesn’t restore the sense of touch. And touch is what lets you grip an egg tightly enough that it doesn’t fall but loosely enough that you don’t smash it.

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Florida International University is a vibrant, student-centered public research university, ideally located in Miami, that is worlds ahead in its commitment to learning, research, entrepreneurship, innovation, and creativity so that our graduates are prepared to succeed in a global market.